The IATE Database

Maria José Palos Caravina

Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union

NPLD Seminar, Dublin

1. Project background and organisation2. IATE Features

– IATE as a collaborative workspace

– Data Structure

– Data Entry and Validation

– Communication mechanisms

– Import/export functionalities

– Cooperation and Common Guidelines

– Best practice guide

– Interinstitutional consolidation projects

– IATE functionalities in a nutshell

3. IATE goes public•Terminology Workflow: from IATE to IATE Public

4. Content issues •Nr. terms, entries, languages, etc.

5. Current developments

The Project

• IATE = “Inter Active Terminology for Europe”

• Objective: creation of an interactive terminology database for the consultation, update and joint management of terminological data from all the European Institutions, Bodies and Agencies.

• Project partners: European Commission, Council, Parliament, Court of Auditors, Economic and Social Committee/Committee of the Regions, Court of Justice (as observer), Translation centre, European Investment bank, European Central Bank.

• The development phase started in January 2000.

• Operational since the summer 2004.

• Available to the public since June 2007.

1. Project organisation

• 2000 – 2004– Project overseen by the Interinstitutional Committee for Translation – Top level group: Expert Group (Institutions, Agencies, Member States)– Steering Committee (Institutions, Agencies, chaired by DG ENTR)– Several technical work groups (data structure, workflow, implementation

support)

• Since 2004– An interinstitutional work group oversees the requests for improvements

and reports to the Interinstitutional Committee for Translation and Interpretation

– IATE Management Group– IATE Support and Development Team at the Translations Centre

carries out corrective and evolutive maintenance

EurodicautomCOM

TISCouncil

EuterpeParliament

Others

IATE merged all existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single database

Several user friendly interfaces were implemented to cater for the needs of translators, terminologists and other EU staff.

IATE in a nutshell

EURODICAUTOM (Commission)• Coverage: 11 EU official languages plus Latin• over 1.240.000 entries (c. 5 million terms) and 325.000 abbreviations

and acronyms (July 1999)• Lenoch classification• Web interfaces on intranet/internet• Fed from work of Terminology Unit (based in Brussels and

Luxembourg), contributions from translators systematized by Eurodicautom team and contributions supplied under contract by private companies and field experts

• Updated weekly• Translators had access to unit-level MultiTerm databases (110)• Low interactivity

TIS (Council)• 11 EU languages plus Latin and Irish.• 200 000 records (600 000 terms) 45% contain 3+ languages. 25 000

records contain 5+ languages• Terminology reflects translation problems that have arisen in Council

texts.• 170 subject codes• Feeding: New terms entered directly by Council's terminologists (5/6

per language division). Other users may enter comments or suggestions. New data searchable immediately (text search on all fields)

• Growth rate: 4 000 translations per month.

Euterpe (EP)• 11 EU official languages plus Latin• 171 000 records• bilingual entries: 92 887• 9-language entries: 13 556• 11-language entries: 5 623• Some with notes or definitions or the Latin equivalent (botany and

zoology) many with the corresponding abbreviations or acronyms• A few terms (titles of political parties, ...) in non-EU languages• The approach is descriptive rather than normative.• IT platform: MultiTerm '95+ database

Euroterms (CdT)• 11 EU official languages plus Norwegian, Latin and Russian

• 180,000 entries

• MultiTerm database

• Client interface

• Interactive access for all in-house translators

• Distributed on CD-ROM to freelance translators

• Data validated, where possible, by domain experts in Agencies

IATE Database

2. IATE: Features2.1. IATE as a collaborative workspace

• On-line search

• On-line data editing

• Validation system

• Communication mechanisms

• User management

• Statistics

Language Independent Information

2.2. IATE Data Structure

Term 1 Term 2 Term 1 Term 2

Language 1EN

Language 2FR

E.g. domain, domain note, origin, problem language, cross reference ...

E.g. definition, comment...

E.g. term, term type, context, grammatical information...

2.3. Data Entry and Validation

New TermValidation

Stage 1Validation

Stage 2Validation

Stage ?Validated

Term

• All institutional IATE users can add terminology to the database.

• IATE provides a validation mechanism to ensure that all new terminology is proof-read.

• The process takes into consideration the specific competencies of the people involved and caters for a review of terminological entries on different levels: spelling, content, coherence, exhaustiveness, etc.

2.4. Communication Mechanisms

• “Marks”: to comment on specific database entries. Marks are attached to an entry and are addressed to individual users or user groups (e.g. the terminology group of a specific language division). Usually the content of the marks is an exchange of information and opinions.

2.5. Import/export functionalities

• IATE has an XML exchange format based on SALT/MARTIF standards

• Problem: It is too complicated to be used by linguists.

• 3 new import functionalities use a simple MS Excel file, namely to:

• modify existing entries (following an export)

• add terms to existing entries

• create new entries

2.6. Cooperation and Common Guidelines

An interinstitutional work group started to organise the practical cooperation between the IATE project partners by…

• Regular interinstitutional communication;• Establishing list of contact points for the terminological questions in

each participating service per language;• Defining “writing rules” for the creation of new terminology;• Creation of a “Best Practice” guide establishing general principles

for IATE use.

• Usefulness of a term for multilingual drafting, translation and interpreting in the EU context

• Reliability of the proposed term.• Relevance of the proposed term.• Information fed into IATE must have an added value over and

above what can be found in documentary databases or on the Internet.

• Responsibility of each service to apply the guidelines.

2.7. Best Practice: Examples

2.8. Interinstitutional consolidation projects

2.9. IATE functionalities in a nutshell

IATE Database

3. IATE Goes Public• Implementation of public

“read-only” site started in 2005/2006 based on indexing technology used for Eurodicautom;

• Hosted at the Data Centre of the European Commission

• 04/2007: the Eurodicautom site was shut down, redirecting its complete user community to IATE.

Fulcrum Index

3.2. IATE Public

•Opened on 28 June 2007

•Provides free of charge access to EU terminology.

IATE Public URL:

http://iate.europa.eu

IATE Mailbox:

iate@cdt.europa.eu

3.1. Terminology Workflow: from IATE to IATE Public

http://iate.europa.euInternal

Publish

Add

Modify

Validate

• The average number of queries submitted per day is about 200.000

• Being 304.034 the highest number of queries for one day, recorded in April 2007

3.3. Is IATE Public actually used?

3.4. IATE never sleeps…

Distribution of IATE queries over 24 hours

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

How many people use IATE?

• As IATE can be used without login or a registration procedure it is not straight forward to answer this question. However, since April 2008 IATE keeps track of the internet (IP) addresses of the computers that are used to access the database. These figures indicate that the IATE user community amounts to about 220.000 people.

Where is IATE used?

• The answer is: around the world. As any internet service IATE is accessible around the globe and usage figures show that the database receives queries from 170 different countries.

Country PercentageGermany 12%France 12%Italy 10%Spain 8%United States 8%Belgium 6%Greece 6%Portugal 4%Netherlands 4%Switzerland 2%United Kingdom 2%Sweden 1%Brazil 1%Denmark 1%Argentina 1%Luxembourg 1%

4. Content Issues IATE in Figures (1)

Service Number of Entries in IATE %

Commission 956170 68

Council 177142 13

European Parliament 189356 14

COR/EESC JS 98 0

Translation Centre 63171 5

European Court of Auditors 1703 0

European Investment Bank 11259 1

1 398 899 100

IATE in Figures (2)

Service Number of Terms in IATE Public %

Commission 5 745 146 73

Council 814 096 10

European Parliament 880 974 11

COR/EESC JS 1 080 0

Translation Centre 348 690 4

European Court of Auditors 11 721 0

European Investment Bank 48 787 1

7 850 494 100

IATE in Figures (3)

bg-Bulgarian 3.487 it-Italian 720.377

cs-Czech 18.893 lt-Lithuanian 31.633

da-Danish 616.843 lv-Latvian 10.424

de-German 1.084.745 mt-Maltese 4.715

el-Greek 526.691 nl-Dutch 711.200

en-English 1.498.503 pl-Polish 25.923

es-Spanish 636.614 pt-Portuguese 543.978

et-Estonian 18.037 ro-Romanian 4.678

fi-Finnish 331.105 sk-Slovak 18.195

fr-French 1.379.044 sl-Slovenian 17.514

ga-Irish 13.453 sv-Swedish 319.079

hu-Hungarian 25.969 la-Latin 84.468

Number of terms in IATE by language:

5. Current developments: IATE Web Services

Basic problem: Find a way to integrate IATE in the Office environment.

Solution: web services...which means:

Web Service

Web Service

IATE Web Services: Status

2 web services have been implemented:

• Look-up of terms in IATE from a Word document;

• Adding terms to (Pre-)IATE from a Word document.

Left to be done:

• Finalisation of the macro prototypes for both services;

• Testing in production environment.

5.1. Possible developments: term checking for Quality Assurance (QA)

• A Term Checker functionality in IATE would allow us to use IATE for text analysis in the context of QA through controlled language.

• Example: you have a specialised and validated set of terminology in IATE and would like to make sure this terminology has been used throughout a text. So you cross-check your text against this filtered set of data in IATE and you will get the source text marked (see example) and a report, by language, stating the terms that differ from the ones in IATE.

Does IATE solve all problems?

IATE provides the technical facilities for cooperation between the EU’s translation services. It does not solve management issues, such as:

What type of data should be added to the database? Is it possible - and desirable - to define an EU core terminology? How can a common “culture” of terminology be created? How can the cooperation between services be organised most

efficiently? What is the role of terminology in the EU’s translation services

today, as other technologies (e.g. translation memories, internet etc.) have become available?

Main achievements

• IATE is today a source of reference for terminology management systems (e.g. UN agencies)

• The „added value“ of IATE – and terminology work in general – will be based on the provision of reliable multilingual information on the EU‘s core activities.

Show IATE Interface:

https://iate.eu-admin.net/iatenew/login.jsp